Globe and Mail: Can-Spam Act a failure

Vircom, a Canadian email security firm, said a study it conducted from the first of the year - the day American spammers were supposed to comply with the Can-Spam Act - showed that only one in 7,500 messages was fully compliant. According to the firm, the key variable that threw the most messages into the non-compliant bin was the lack of a physical address (one in 4,000 messages).

Lawyers are telling email firms and would-be marketers that many of the Can-Spam provisions remain unclear as to exactly what they mean, as the issues generally haven't been brought up yet in courts. For instance, is an opt-in newsletter on poetry a "commercial email" if it has a text ad in it? Most seem to think not, but email software firms have been fairly strict in their definitions for the purposes of these studies, and they have indicated a surprising degree of certainty.